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it’s Friday and it was finally Florida weather again, so right out of the gate the day was off to a good start.
I take Echo for a walk and this little 4-5 year old boy walks around the corner, sees Echo and just starts cracking up while pointing at Echo like little kids do. Echo wasn’t even doing anything but sniffing the ground, then started wagging his tail and tongue looking at the kid because that dog loves kids and babies. The kid was almost drooling from laughing when his mom walked around the corner and got that parent smile seeing her kid happy. Just a brief, good interaction with strangers, but that wasn’t the awesome part.
I’ve been hearing my neighbor’s daughter practicing clarinet for the last 9 months or so and realized pretty quickly that she gets it due to how she’s practicing. If she makes a mistake she starts at the beginning and you’ll hear her adjusting the breath to get the best sound she can out of it and you can tell she’s focusing on note value because of where she’s stopping and starting over. I’ve been meaning to give her a thumb’s up/acknowledgement just for some encouragement, but the time hasn’t really presented itself.
I was walking to my car this morning and my neighbor walked by and said “Oh hey, today is our last day here. Thank you for being a good neighbor, we barely ever heard you playing music!” and I’m glad she said that because it reminded me of the daughter, so I told her “Hey, I’ve actually been meaning to tell you and your daughter, she’s not practicing like someone who wants to be good, she’s practicing like someone who is going to be great”- neighbor grabs her face and I can see the tears forming, but I went on, “She’s putting her effort into the boring stuff everyone wants to skip over, that kind of practice is generally only for those with the more-than-a-hobby passion for it”
She said “The music director at our church said the same thing about her and I’m just so happy because it’s been rough lately and she’s been trying to find something to belong to …” and that’s when the waterworks kicked in for me because that’s the exact reason I started playing guitar. I told her “That’s exactly why I started and it’s why I’m alive today. But please, pat yourself on the back and have some gratitude for yourself because you’re supporting her in it and that is huge. It’s huge now and it’ll be even bigger the older she gets.” and it’s rare I can tell a parent anything about parenting as a result of not having my own, but I can certainly speak on that aspect of things and I’m glad I did because she went from happy tears to sobbing and we both had a very shaky goodbye with frogs in our throats.
It was a really endearing experience for me for multiple reasons, the biggest being that knowing kids are still turning to instruments when life isn’t so rosy, that makes me fucking THRILLED and there’s not a lot of gratitude to be found out there these days, so it was particularly pleasing to see and experience so much of it before I even got in my car this morning, to the point I had to sit in my car for a minute and sit in the gratitude before participating with the rest of the world.
Peace, love and good happiness stuff, for sure.
I take Echo for a walk and this little 4-5 year old boy walks around the corner, sees Echo and just starts cracking up while pointing at Echo like little kids do. Echo wasn’t even doing anything but sniffing the ground, then started wagging his tail and tongue looking at the kid because that dog loves kids and babies. The kid was almost drooling from laughing when his mom walked around the corner and got that parent smile seeing her kid happy. Just a brief, good interaction with strangers, but that wasn’t the awesome part.
I’ve been hearing my neighbor’s daughter practicing clarinet for the last 9 months or so and realized pretty quickly that she gets it due to how she’s practicing. If she makes a mistake she starts at the beginning and you’ll hear her adjusting the breath to get the best sound she can out of it and you can tell she’s focusing on note value because of where she’s stopping and starting over. I’ve been meaning to give her a thumb’s up/acknowledgement just for some encouragement, but the time hasn’t really presented itself.
I was walking to my car this morning and my neighbor walked by and said “Oh hey, today is our last day here. Thank you for being a good neighbor, we barely ever heard you playing music!” and I’m glad she said that because it reminded me of the daughter, so I told her “Hey, I’ve actually been meaning to tell you and your daughter, she’s not practicing like someone who wants to be good, she’s practicing like someone who is going to be great”- neighbor grabs her face and I can see the tears forming, but I went on, “She’s putting her effort into the boring stuff everyone wants to skip over, that kind of practice is generally only for those with the more-than-a-hobby passion for it”
She said “The music director at our church said the same thing about her and I’m just so happy because it’s been rough lately and she’s been trying to find something to belong to …” and that’s when the waterworks kicked in for me because that’s the exact reason I started playing guitar. I told her “That’s exactly why I started and it’s why I’m alive today. But please, pat yourself on the back and have some gratitude for yourself because you’re supporting her in it and that is huge. It’s huge now and it’ll be even bigger the older she gets.” and it’s rare I can tell a parent anything about parenting as a result of not having my own, but I can certainly speak on that aspect of things and I’m glad I did because she went from happy tears to sobbing and we both had a very shaky goodbye with frogs in our throats.
It was a really endearing experience for me for multiple reasons, the biggest being that knowing kids are still turning to instruments when life isn’t so rosy, that makes me fucking THRILLED and there’s not a lot of gratitude to be found out there these days, so it was particularly pleasing to see and experience so much of it before I even got in my car this morning, to the point I had to sit in my car for a minute and sit in the gratitude before participating with the rest of the world.
Peace, love and good happiness stuff, for sure.
